Death of an Elgin Marble by David Dickinson

American’s special wish, before he went back to Baltimore, that the young man should carve something appropriate to adorn his tomb in the local cemetery after his death. The rich American only lasted three weeks after his return, for the journey must have taken more out of him than he realized. His funeral was held in his local church where he had been an elder for many years, the Third Presbyterian off Jefferson Drive in the wealthiest part of the city, and the body was duly interred in the cemetery. In the coffin was the offering from the young sculptor in Wales, a triumphant angel, wings furled, her arm aloft, pointing the way to heaven for the dead American relative. Surely she would see him to the last frontier and a better world.
    A firm from Bristol were to organize transport to that city and the transhipment to America. They were one of the most experienced companies in the country at this sort of work. They watched the great lorry moving slowly down the mountain road, the sculptor, the carpenter, the undertaker and the schoolteacher, until it turned the corner by the railway bridge and vanished from sight, the noise of the engine the last link to fade away. They decided to hold a wake for their departed friend in the snug of the Green Dragon next to the undertaker’s whose doors had only just opened for the day. How else could they mark the passing of a Caryatid, well over two thousand years old, on her journey of three thousand miles to a new home across the seas?
    ‘I’m afraid I’ve had rather an unconventional thought,’ said Inspector Christopher Kingsley, taking a cup of Earl Grey in the Powerscourt drawing room at about half past six in the evening. He now had a permanent invitation to call around this time.
    Powerscourt looked at him keenly. Policemen, even ones in the habit of reading modern novels, were not usually supposed to harbour such thoughts.
    ‘How unconventional?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.
    ‘Well, I’m not actually ashamed of it, now I come to think about it,’ the Inspector said, ‘it could prove rather useful in our investigation.’
    ‘Tell us more, please,’ Lady Lucy chipped in.
    ‘Well, I was talking about the Caryatid to my children yesterday evening. I should have been reading them a bedside story but my mind was so full of the marble lady with the long tunic that I told them all about her instead.’
    ‘And what did they say?’ asked Powerscourt.
    ‘This is the interesting thing, my lord, Lady Lucy. James and Rosalind, he’s seven and she’s five, asked a whole lot of questions I don’t think we would have thought of.’
    ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,’ said Lady Lucy, remembering the psalm and hoping the words could help bring forth victory, ‘hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.’
    ‘Probably,’ said the Inspector, slightly thrown by this display of biblical knowledge. ‘Anyway, Rosalind wanted to know if the Caryatid had to have her face washed. And her hair, the little one added after a second’s thought. James asked if she could talk to the other statues at night when all the people had gone away. Rosalind asked me if she had been a real person once. Did the sculptor copy a living lady to make his Caryatid? What sort of house would she have lived in? What sort of food would she have eaten? Would she be forced to have porridge for breakfast like everybody else? There were lots more queries along the same lines. I began to think I might have been better sticking to Toad’s adventures in
The Wind in the Willows
after a while.’
    ‘What interesting questions,’ said Lady Lucy.
    ‘I’m not sure I could have answered them all,’ Powerscourt added. ‘Forgive me, please, but I can’t for the moment discern how they might help us in this inquiry.’
    ‘That only came to me this morning, my lord. One of our problems, as you both know, is that we can’t talk to any